Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Social Issues And Morally Lazy Republicans

Thanks to State Representative Rob Samson, one of the few
legislators who have not been cowed by Connecticut’s powerful abortion lobby,
abortion extremists have publicly shown their horns.

The Family Institute of Connecticut (FIC) put it this way: “On the final day of the legislative session June 7th,
Rep. Rob Sampson attached a pro-life parental notification amendment to a
contraception bill. But the possibility that a parent might be notified about
her underage daughter’s decision to have an abortion so enraged Connecticut’s
pro-abortion lobbyists that they killed their own bill rather than allow a vote
on the amendment!”

Resistance to extremist social views on the part of the
moderate corner of Connecticut’s campaign barracks has been virtually non-existent
for a host of reasons. Within the Democratic Party, what used to be called the
moderate “vital center” is no longer vital or centrist. Progressivism,
especially on social issues, has moved the needle far to the left. Democrats
have moved far beyond liberalism in the direction of libertinism. Republicans
are either cowards or they see no political utility in opposing abortion
extremist groups, an extremist being anyone, including Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, who believes that
the abortion industry should never be subject to the indignity of regulations,
however prudent and necessary. This single-minded devotion to non-regulation is
a glaring piece of hypocrisy in the case of Blumenthal, for two decades and
more the state’s hyper-regulatory Attorney General.

Moral posturing within the Democratic Party now is devoted
almost exclusively to vote-generating left of center campaign positions –
abortion on demand, curtsies to the selling of baby parts harvested from late
term abortions, transgender bathrooms in public institutions, and a desperate
move on the part of the children of the Woodstock Generation to legalize pot –
so that at some future date they might tax it. The campaign motto of
progressive Democrats in future elections should be, “Vote Democratic, For Pot
In Every Pot.” Far left moral anarchists apparently have drawn a red line on the
Swiftian notion that survivors in the moral race to the bottom should eat
babies whose lives they have destroyed.

Jonathan Swift, who was after all the Dean of Saint
Patrick’s in Ireland, was morally upright enough to satirize the brutal
treatment of the Irish. But it is impossible to satirize the brutal treatment
of “these, the least among us,” because the essence of satire is exaggeration,
and it is difficult to exaggerate the absurd pretensions of those who make
virtues out of vices they then press upon the young and the poor. How, exactly,
does one satirize an objection to a bill in which the honor of parents is
upheld against someone, for example, who has seduced an underage child,
impregnated her and then procured an abortion for her without her parents being
the wiser? Satire is made impossible by putatively “moral” legislators who lend
their honor to the killing of such a measure, rather as if abortion itself were
to be understood as a secular sacrament.

Terry McAuliffe, soon to be ex-Governor of Virginia and a Democratic presidential prospect,
comes right out and says it: “I’m trying to run a progressive state, putting
progressive values out there. At the same time, making sure everybody has an
opportunity for a job. I call it more values and a moral structure than
labeling anything. The values of open and welcoming: pro-women’s rights,
pro-gay rights, pro-environment, anti-gun. Those are a value system. You know,
that’s who I am.” These are not moral values; they are Democratic Party
campaign stickers.

Four years ago, Powell writes in a recent column, he had
argued in a column that welfare-induced poverty, fatherless households and the
dumbing down of education was having a predictable effect on slumping newspaper
sales: “Newspapers still can sell themselves to traditional households --
two-parent families involved with their children, schools, churches, sports,
civic groups, and such. But newspapers cannot sell themselves to households
headed by single women who have several children by different fathers, survive
on welfare stipends, can hardly speak or read English, move every few months to
cheat their landlords, barely know what town they're living in, and couldn't
afford a newspaper subscription even if they could read. And such households constitute
a rising share of the population."

Last year, Powell noted, an East Hartford superintendent
testified in a court case that “his schools are hobbled because 71 percent of
their students are so poor that they qualify for free or discounted lunches, 15
percent have learning disabilities, 12 percent don't speak English, many need
social workers to make up for parental neglect, and many are transient and
disoriented, moving in or out of town or their school district during the
school year as their families, most headed by single women, lose and regain
housing.”

Politics does not produce culture; it is the culture – the
network of so called “social issues” – that shapes politics. It what sense is a
culture moral that lauds, finances or excuses abortion, broken families,
violence in the streets, and life-long
social stratification produced by a welfare system that traps people in
poverty? These are matters too important to be left to columnists, the welfare
state and Republicans too weary to confront in public campaigns the new
morality of progressive Democrats.

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For
35 years a political columnist published in a variety of Connecticut newspapers,
Don Pesci has written for the Middletown Press, the Torrington Register
Citizen, The Waterbury Republican American, the Norwich Bulletin, the Day of
New London, the Journal Inquirer of Manchester, the Providence Journal, and
others; he is also the proprietor of a popular blog, Connecticut Commentary:
Red Notes from a Blue State, one of the older Connecticut blogs. Most of the
columns are printed here, roughly 2,500 entrees.